Between Angels and Insects
by Billywick
Summary: Human Alex Mercer on his very last day alive. This is two-part drabble which is incredibly Alex-centric. Nerd!Alex is best xD


**Between Angels and Insects**

**5.30am.**

The shrill note of his alarm had barely touched his eardrum and he was awake. He probably didn't even need the little device to wake up to anymore. His body knew it was time to wake, his mind was long since active.

He only went through the motions daily now. Wake up, get up, shuffle into the bathroom, shower, brush teeth, leave for work. Breakfast would be a coffee and a cigarette later. Though he shouldn't have started smoking again, at least that's what Karen says.

Karen.

Fuck Karen.

She was the one insisting they end whatever crumbled ruin of a relationship they had left. Whatever. He'd only been doing her a favour by staying with her anyway. His mind was never there when she ran her fingers down his chest, his thoughts in his lab, his body with her in bed.

That had been nearly a year ago and still, Alex felt none the worse. Actually, that was probably one of the last great choices he had made, staying away from Karen Parker. She looked at him now and then, fuck, she stared at him through the glass almost every day. He didn't care.

The pale young man nearing his thirties rolled over once more, burrowing his head into the warm blanket smelling faintly of his own sweat and fabric softener. Another half an hour before he would fight himself out of the comforts of a warm bed.

He'd found a metric shit ton of things he didn't care about anymore, Karen and sex being some of them. Nothing compared to the importance of what he did every single day. He was a willing slave to his work and it was leading up to something big. Something would happen at the head of all of this and Alex Mercer would be caught up in the ensuing shitstorm.

And yet, he couldn't help himself. He had to keep working. Had to, because if he figured this out, he had his life's work set for him. Work...no, that wasn't even the right term for it. Work implied that it was something you could just leave at the strike of six or seven, something that could wait all night for your return without urgency. Work was different.

Alex Mercer's 'work' was his life. Everything else, every notorious little detail of his life was a chore. Going home in the evening, long after everyone else had left the lab...finding something to engage his mind with so he could kill the few hours between sleeping and returning to the lab...that was the real work.

He'd started taking home files. Notes at first, later, small samples, results, his personal observations and reports. Not because he'd been paranoid right from the start, when Gentek had hired him straight after graduation and made him not only researcher on a very classified project, but head researcher on the most interesting...

Alright, he wasn't even at work yet, but his mind was buzzing, ahead of him by hours, already in the lab. What would he witness today? Alex was surprised that he could still think so enthusiastically about working at Gentek. He'd found out enough of their little dealings recently. Actually, more than he'd ever cared to know. He wished to hell he would have stopped to think earlier, before he got involved so very deeply. Now, there was no backing out. Blackwatch was observing, picking off unstable employees and he was in their sights. He could practically feel it.

Cringing out of bed, Alex let his body go through the motions. The bathroom was cold, frigid compared to the warmth of the bed he'd abandoned. How long had it been that someone had shared that bed? More than four months, definitely. Didn't matter though. Anyone coming into contact with him now...was either Blackwatch or working for them.

He had to assume the worst because he knew damn well that he, as a person, as a human being, barely existed anymore.

**6.00am.**

His puffs of breath were steaming out in small clouds through his teeth. The hot water pouring over his shoulders felt like small streams of lava, warming only thin strips of his pale skin. His back and shoulders ached, sourly reminding him that bending over a microscope for more than eight hours a day had certain repercussions. He'd ignore it, as always.

A groan and a stretch and the water covered a greater area. Alex closed his eyes and dipped his head forward. He'd never liked being submerged in water, the last time he'd been in a water-body bigger than the tub was over twenty years ago, when he was a little kid and Dana hadn't even been born yet.

The small clumps of hair-gel still tangled between messy black tresses of hair slowy dissolved as he ran a hand through the whole mop on his head, smoothing it back and out of the way. Another handful of that gel when he got out would keep it out of his eyes all day. Who cared if he looked like 'a sleezy old geezer' as Dana had put it so 'fittingly' weeks ago.

Dana. Not a subject Alex particularly wanted to consider in the shower, but thinking of his sister and the very brief visit he'd given her brought his circling thoughts right back to Blackwatch, a subject his mind liked to embrace and work slowly through all his mental cogs until Alex felt eyes in every corner of the room, a gun pressed to his back and silent threats about opening his mouth.

Someone was out there, maybe even right now, to get him.

Fear was never something Alex Mercer had dealt with well. Fear made him weary of everything in his life, made him weary of even stepping outside. He used to feel safe, travelling to the Gentek lab, going out to whatever occasion Karen had planned for the evening, coming home to his apartment on Upper Eastside. When had that changed? When he'd realized what he was working on was far more than a little genetic mutation for medical purposes? When he'd started noticing soldiers in black, escorting people out of the building? When those people had mysteriously quit overnight and without ever returning to collect their personal effects?

The water sloshed down the drain at his feet as he reached for one of the few bottles held in the tray beneath the faucet. Some non-descript shower-gel that would do the job of washing away his disgustingly human body scent. He wondered if the people working in these kind of items ever felt as if they would leave work one night and be made to disappear by some unknown boogey-man branch of the government. Probably not.

**6.15am.**

The scrape of the toothbrush against his tongue was oddly satisfying. The bitter taste of morning breath removed with every brush and circular motion, he was starting to feel clean. His hair was already slicked back and drying, not something he would waste another minute of his morning with. His stomach churned, empty as usual, but it had never fit into his morning to satisfy a bodily need for food. Breakfast was supposedly the best way to get your mind and body ready to perform their best at whatever profession you were following. Alex had never bought into it. Not that he couldn't explain it scientifically, of course. He understood it that way perfectly well.

But his mind was ready to 'work' the second he woke up, so much so he'd often considered sleeping in his lab, just so he wouldn't have to take a break from his observations and experiments.

A quick gargle and he spat out the mixture of water, saliva and toothpaste. He saw a swirl of crimson and grimaced before rinsing out his mouth and wiping his face. Those rings around his eyes were getting darker, despite the fact he got five to six hours of sleep a night. Didn't matter though. His physical appearance was deteriorating ever since he entered university, much to the dismay of those around him. Why couldn't they understand that some things were far more important than looking 'healthy'? Besides, he felt healthy. The churning burn in his stomach, the ache in his shoulders and the complete weariness he could feel crawling up his spine had become his constant companions and he found their presence reassuring. Despite his overworking habits, his constantly busy mind and his complete lack of a social life, he was still human. Probably a more fucked up human than most, but still human.

Science didn't just need computers that progressively got better at working by themselves. Science needed bright minds like his, needed deft fingers that could pick up vials, that could operate microscopes, that could observe and make discoveries. That's what he'd lived for, as long as he could remember. At least, it had been how he justified his obsession and ambition.

Youngest doctor, honours on his final thesis and a top-notch job as head researcher. Fuck, he'd been living his dream. And yet, there was no satisfaction in all of this. Feeling hollow, someone had once told him, didn't require you to have nothing in your life. Much the opposite, you could have the most satisfying, successful life imaginable without feeling one ounce of...well, what should he call it? Happiness?

Happiness. What a trivial, entirely stupid concept. Happiness was something for the uneducated masses. The ones who lived their lives brainlessly, in pursuit of wealth and social standing. The herd, as he put it in a conversation with Karen once. Back when she had still been someone he confided a portion of his thoughts to.

She hadn't understood. She'd stared at him blankly, then asked slowly and carefully what he thought SHE was.

Alex had never answered that question. Karen had felt like someone similar once, a very long time ago. But she too was hollow, in pursuit of a meaningless goal he could never relate to.

**6.30am.**

His clothes felt alien on his skin now. Scratchy, dry cotton, fabrics that had been washed over and over and lost any semblance to being soft and comfortable as they were once advertised to be. No matter. He'd forget about them as soon as he set foot outside of his flat. An ice-blue gaze wandered over the large blackboard he'd been writing on last night in a frenzied fit of revelation. A gene code, a little side-project on genetic memory that had been plaguing his head for the last week when he'd actually managed to hit a block in extracting a certain strain of the virus he'd been given as his research project. Other people played or watched sports, went out and got laid if they were stuck on something. Not Alex Mercer. Retentive genetic memory was like a little doodle-book for him, something he let his mind dwell on. It was interesting and it had potential. In those rare moments when Alex let his thoughts wander beyond the realm of the immediately possible, he thought of humans being able to see their memories. Genetically speaking, it wouldn't be terribly much, but with some scientific progress, reliving the memories of your ancestors could be possible...

But it was just a side-project, something he spared maybe two minutes on a day when he got home and shoved a ready-made meal into the microwave before settling onto the sofa and restlessly browsing the news.

Another tug on the collar of his shirt, another stroke over the wrinkled edges of his sleeves. He'd be wearing a lab-coat soon enough anyway and particles in a slide didn't give a piss about wrinkles in your clothes. The looks from his colleagues he'd long since grown used to and ignored them as easily as one might ignore pigeons in central park. They were probably on par with a bird's brain power too, the way they paid more attention to his deteriorating appearance than to their work.

**6.45am.**

Stepping outside into the world was the worst part of his day, undoubtedly. Though it was quite early in the morning, traffic was already thick and the pavement crowded with people travelling to their various occupations. Alex took a breath of polluted air and suppressed a sneer. He didn't want to think about how many toxic gases were floating around him right now, how much fucking pollution just filled his lungs. He'd considered going out with a gasmask before, but that idea had been dispelled as a ridiculous notion that would bring him unwanted attention.

The trick to being paranoid was to let no one realize that you were, in fact, aware of eyes watching you. Be it through cameras in his lab or a sniper's scope whilst he walked down the street...

A brief glance up, a quick and careful eye for any suspicious parked vans on the street, then the young scientist set off on his path to Gentek. Tonight, he'd take a sample out with him. A real fucking sample, not just some paper notes on his discovery of the special strain of Blacklight.

Alex' gaze was cast down onto the worn leather of his boots as he pulled his hood deeply into his face. It'd be harder to identify him if he didn't stop to present his pale visage to every fucking passerby out on the street in the morning.

Blackwatch were onto him, he knew that. He could feel that something was going to happen to him and if he didn't act, he'd disappear. Just like Henderson two weeks ago, just like Rachels a month before.

**11.30am.**

Karen hadn't come in this morning. That in itself wasn't strange. Alex was pretty sure he didn't care, not even when one of his assistants told him his ex was seeing a new man. He really couldn't bring up any sort of emotion for it, so he had stared blankly, then shrugged his shoulders and told the man to get back to work and that he needed a fresh sample inside of a sealed vial by the afternoon. The extraction from the mass of mutated flesh that they'd been experimenting on would take some time and Alex wasn't dumb enough to do something so suspicious as drawing an unnecessary sample himself.

Bending down to view the little black virus cells destroying a leukocyte in a manner of split seconds, he relished the feeling of the anxiety mellowing out of his thoughts. Here was what was important to him; research.

Beakers, vials, samples, microscopes and clipboards didn't ask him how he was, if he had a life outside of the lab, they didn't ask about trivial matters such as emotions, his lovelife or even his god damn favourite TV show. None of that had ever mattered to him and Alex could never fathom why it would interest him.

Sometimes, he felt as if he was on a little glass slide and the world examined him like a fucking abstract strain of mutating cells too. Maybe his life was just a little maze that someone had built to watch him scurry like a rat. Maybe the whole of humanity was just someone's scientific little experiment that could be destroyed as easily as a house of cards. What a feeble, fickle existence humans lead.

When he watched the news, he couldn't feel pity or regret. Warzone pictures of dead children, the suffering of hundreds, thousands of people worlds away was nothing more than a cry for earth to be rid of the human virus, eating through millions of years of evolution, wiping out nature and it's own means to live.

Ridiculous. Humanity, as a whole, was a cancer. And one day, something would sweep the planet, some unstoppable revenge, a plague of 'biblical' proportions.

Alex Mercer had long since stopped feeling part of humanity. He was but a small piece of it all, working on bettering what was to become of their race. Maybe his research was the key to nothing, but at least he knew, on some deeper level that it was significant.

This wasn't the kind of project you told anyone about and the fact that those who seemed liable to do so had disappeared had told Alex more than he'd ever needed to know. Gentek, Blackwatch...they were in so fucking deep no one saw the through to the bottom of their plans.

That's why he'd visited Dana after not even contacting her for five years. That's why he'd started being so aware of everything happening around him, that's why he'd started taking his research home.

Because he too was in so deeply that there was no breaking free of it, no way of returning to a life where one just lived with the goal of retiring in fifty years...

There was no life beyond Gentek and Blackwatch for Alex Mercer.

**2.15pm.**

The shuffle of feet and muffled voices were the only indications for Alex that he was about to be alone in the large laboratory. His colleagues were off for lunch, which would take them roughly an hour and out of the building. Now was the moment he'd been anticipating. He ran though his plan in his head just one more time. His assistant, Peterson, should have left the vial in the exact place he'd asked for, a sheltered little corner behind the supply cabinet, a tiny blind spot in the ever-present vision of the security cameras. Alex would slip it into his pocket, later transfer it into his jacket when his colleagues were returning from lunch and hanging up their street-clothes.

But he had sixty minutes to do it, so there wasn't any reason to look up from his reports right now. His assistants had been lazy over the last days. Sloppy, even. These were results he could have found in an hour, yet they had taken over two days to do so.

He gave a disapproving little grunt and pushed the tattered frame of his reading glasses up on the bridge of his nose.

In just six hours, he'd leave this building with a new chance of escaping the spiralling trap Gentek had spun for him, his own personal downfall. And Alex had been ever so eager to work himself into it.

TBC


End file.
